This program project is a coordinated set of six studies that assess the adequacy of various public and private mechanisms for providing security to elderly persons: (1) Risks to Economic Well-Being at Older Ages: A Cross- National Comparison of the U.S. and Germany; (2) Cross National Comparisons on a Larger Scale: Elderly East and West and the Social Cost of Retirement; (3) Equivalence Scales; (4) Retirement and Work after Retirement in U.S. and Germany; (5) Effects of Public Subsidies on Use of Long-Term Care; and (6) CCRCs: Self Insurance for Nursing Home Care. We address these broad questions. How do major life events after age 50, such as retirement, death of a spouse, major illness or change in functional status affect resources available to families? How do public programs and private arrangements affect decisions that elderly persons make about retirement and work after retirement and decisions other family members make with regard to informal caregiving and institutionalizing elderly persons? To what extent are elderly women at special risk for dramatic drops in income and is the U.S. safety net less adequate in this respect than those of other countries? How well do current policies help the oldest old cope with expenditure risk of long-term care and do public policies encourage or discourage provision of informal care of elderly persons? Our program is distinctive in four respects: (1) emphasis on cross-national comparisons, especially between the U.S. and Germany; (2) focus on dynamic behavior, in particular in tracing effects of adverse life events on family income; (3) work on equivalence scales for making comparisons in well-being across households; and (4) emphasis on public policies and institutional arrangements -- documenting them and assessing how and how well they work. This project will not only improve our understanding of some important research issues affecting the elderly, but will also make substantial improvements in data bases for research on the elderly, especially in the German Socioeconomic Panel. We will devote considerable resources to documentation so that these data bases can be used by other U.S. researchers.